Date
7-21-2026
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)
Chair
Steven Woodworth
Keywords
Gettysburg, Sickles, Peach Orchard, Little Round Top, Wheatfield, Devil’s Den, Meade-Sickles Controversy, Civil War
Disciplines
History
Recommended Citation
Schoeffel, Michael Karl, "A Tactical Reassessment of Sickles at Gettysburg" (2026). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 8689.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/8689
Abstract
July 2, 1863, a day that will live in the annuals of United States military history forever. On that day, Union General Daniel Sickles disregarded his orders and advanced his Third Corps from the Cemetery Ridge line to a position well in advance of his orders. Participants of the battle as well as various historians have bashed Sickles for over one hundred and sixty years for doing so. The general consensus was Sickles had committed a terrible blunder or a massive mistake. They have written how this movement could have caused the defeat of the Union army at Gettysburg, and possibly resulted in the Union losing the entire war.
However, by observing Sickles’s actions from a different perspective, a different point of view, a new paradigm is quickly established. By advancing to the Emmitsburg Road line, Sickles not only established a position that enabled him to utilize to its maximum lethality the artillery of his corps, but also the added guns of the Artillery Reserve. While his corps suffered tremendous losses, so did the Confederate attackers. Longstreet lost troops that would have been put to good use the following day, attacking the Union center. This paper will attempt to not only scrutinize Sickles’s advanced position, but it will also take a hard in-depth look at the originally ordered line. Creating a hypothetical attack on the original line will open a window into what might have happened had Sickles tried to defend it. Could Sickles possibly hold that line against a determined Confederate attack. By analyzing Sickles’s actions from a different perspective, vindication for his actions will arrive over one hundred years after the fact.
